psql: could not connect to server: No such file or directory
Is the server running locally and accepting
connections on Unix domain socket "/var/run/postgresql/.s.PGSQL.5432"?

PG is definitely running and the pg_hba.conf file looks like this:

# TYPE DATABASE USER CIDR-ADDRESS METHOD
# "local" is for Unix domain socket connections only
local all all md5
# IPv4 local connections:
host all all 127.0.0.1/32 md5
# IPv6 local connections:
host all all ::1/128 md5

This issue comes form installing the postgres package with out a version number. Although postgres will be installed and it will be the correct version the script to setup the cluster will not be run correctly. It's a packaging issue. If your comfortable with Postgres there is a script you can run to crete this cluster and get postgres running however if your like me then you do it the easy way. First purdge the old postgres install. The issue currently lies with 9.1 so I will assume that's what you have installed

I had to compile PostgreSQL 8.1 on Debian Squeeze because I am using Project Open, which is based on OpenACS and will not run on more recent versions of PostgreSQL.

The default compile configuration puts the unix_socket in /tmp, but Project Open, which relies on PostgreSQL, would not work because it looks for the unix_socket at /var/run/postgresql.

There is a setting in postgresql.conf to set the location of the socket. My problem was that either I could set for /tmp and psql worked, but not project open, or I could set it for /var/run/postgresql and psql would not work but project open did.

One resolution to the issue is to set the socket for /var/run/postgresql and then run psql, based on Peter's suggestion, as:

psql -h /var/run/postgresql

This runs locally using local permissions. The only drawback is that it is more typing than simply "psql".

The other suggestion that someone made was to create a symbolic link between the two locations. This also worked, but, the link disappeared upon reboot. It maybe easier to just use the -h argument, however, I created the symbolic link from within the PostgreSQL script in /etc/init.d. I placed the symbolic link create command in the "start" section. Of course, when I issue a stop and start or restart command, it will try to recreate an existing symbolic link, but other than warning message, there is probably no harm in that.

In my case, instead of:

ln -s /tmp/.s.PGSQL.5432 /var/run/postgresql/.s.PGSQL.5432

I have

ln -s /var/run/postgresql/.s.PGSQL.5432 /tmp/.s.PGSQL.5432

and have explicitly set the unix_socket to /var/run/postgresql/.s.PGSQL.5432 in postgresql.conf.

The error message refers to a Unix-domain socket, so you need to tweak your netstat invocation to not exclude them. So try it without the option -t:

netstat -nlp | grep 5432

I would guess that the server is actually listening on the socket /tmp/.s.PGSQL.5432 rather than the /var/run/postgresql/.s.PGSQL.5432 that your client is attempting to connect to. This is a typical problem when using hand-compiled or third-party PostgreSQL packages on Debian or Ubuntu, because the source default for the Unix-domain socket directory is /tmp but the Debian packaging changes it to /var/run/postgresql.

Possible workarounds:

Use the clients supplied by your third-party package (call /opt/djangostack-1.3-0/postgresql/bin/psql). Possibly deinstall the Ubuntu-supplied packages altogether (might be difficult because of other reverse dependencies).

Fix the socket directory of the third-party package to be compatible with Debian/Ubuntu.

Use -h localhost to connect via TCP/IP instead.

Use -h /tmp or equivalent PGHOST setting to point to the right directory.

You can use psql -U postgres -h localhost to force the connection to happen over TCP instead of UNIX domain sockets; your netstat output shows that the PostgreSQL server is listening on localhost's port 5432.

You can find out which local UNIX socket is used by the PostgrSQL server by using a different invocavtion of netstat:

netstat -lp --protocol=unix | grep postgres

At any rate, the interfaces on which the PostgreSQL server listens to are configured in postgresql.conf.